


Then it's Time to Stop and Check the Map

by thought



Series: I went to space and all I got was... [3]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Nobody Dies, Gen, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, ablism is insidious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 18:03:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12636315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: In which everyone is FINE and nobody is having crises of identity or ethics. No, really.





	Then it's Time to Stop and Check the Map

**Author's Note:**

> With a million thanks to [Frith_in_Thorns](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns) for the fantastic and super speedy beta.  
> CW: discussion of gun violence, illusions to child abuse and canonical substance abuse

Isabel and Doug have somehow managed to gather everyone in the living room to catch up on the Star Wars movies they'd missed while they were in space. Renée has never watched a Star Wars movie in her life and has not been feeling particularly deprived. Dmitri looks like he's about ten seconds away from smothering himself with a pillow, and Maxwell isn't even being subtle about the game she's playing on her laptop. The others seem agreeable enough, but by the time they've moved on to Rogue One Renée can tell most of them are getting antsy. Space isn't exactly her favourite subject anymore, so sue her.

It's Jacobi's turn to get the popcorn, and when he gets up she can hear the faint popping of his back as he straightens from where she's sitting on the couch beside the armchair that he and Maxwell are squished into. He makes a face, and Maxwell laughs at him under her breath.

"You need some help, old man?"

"Fuck you," he says mildly. "You just wait. It's all downhill after thirty and we're buying you a fucking cake to mourn your youth."

Maxwell sticks a foot out in a half-hearted attempt to kick him in the shins. Something cold and sick is settling in Renée's stomach. "Maxwell," she says, forcing her tone easy and casual. "How old are you?"

Maxwell doesn't look up from her laptop. "29."

"30 in a few months," Jacobi sing-songs.

Renée sets her tea mug down very gently on the end table. Presses her hands against her face. Sitting beside her, Dom touches her shoulder and raises a silent eyebrow when she looks over at him.

It could, she thinks numbly, have been much worse. In those few seconds before the answer she was expecting it to be much worse. But it's still. It's still... 28. She would have been 28. Renée's got a cousin who would be about 28 now. If Hera's research (snooping) is to be believed, he's currently paying off student loans with a barista's salary, failing at putting together Ikea furniture, and playing Dungeons and Dragons every Friday night.

She stands up, still forcing herself to act calm and casual. She even makes it to the bathroom before she falls to her knees, arms curled around her stomach as she hunches over the toilet. Nothing comes up, but her breathing is shallow and when she goes to straighten up she almost tips over, lightheaded and shaky. Beside her the radiator grumbles as the heating kicks in, and the light above the sink flickers briefly. It all feels suddenly too mundane, unreal. She stares at her hands and cannot imagine a gun there. She thinks of Maxwell -- Alana -- curled up in the ratty second-hand armchair with her hair sticking up in six directions and her bright green fuzzy socks and she thinks about holding a gun to her head, thinks about pulling the trigger, the way bone and skin and flesh are made so insubstantial in that second of release before you're left with a mess and a thing that used to be a person. She thinks about a day, three months before when she'd come up behind Maxwell while she was crouched on the ground fixing the broken dishwasher and Maxwell had greeted her absently, how they'd been in the same room for five minutes and then Maxwell had turned around and Renée had been standing close behind her and Maxwell had flinched so hard she'd hit the back of her head on the worktop.

Renée's only killed one person, and that was from a distance, and they were trying to kill her, and she never saw the body, just the flash of the explosion as their plane dropped out of sight behind the trees. She's seen about two weeks of combat, all told in her entire career. It should not hit her in such an uncompromising, visceral way, this unrealized potential world where she pulled the trigger and Dr. Alana Maxwell (28) ceased to exist.

She wants to say she wouldn't have done it. She doesn't know. She will do a lot of things for her people and at the time Maxwell was decidedly not one of her people. She was a risk. A danger. A chess piece. And Renée does not fool herself-- Maxwell wouldn't have hesitated to kill her if their positions had been reversed. Still might. Renée remembers being 28 in the same way she remembers being 16, fond and a little nostalgic and kind of embarrassed. She was a different person, and every version of her has felt like an adult, like there is nothing more to learn, like she has everything handled.

She recognizes that same forced confidence in Maxwell now in ways she hadn't back on the Hephaestus. That jaw forward back straight every document memorized kind of maturity that comes from fighting to be taken seriously in a world that feels filled with people older or wiser or more powerful than you. Yeah. Renée's fucking familiar. Renée's been playing that role since she was eight years old and sitting at restaurant tables or on over-stuffed sofas with her parents' friends and colleagues chatting about science and politics over their wine glasses like they were talking about the weather.

There are differences, of course. Renée grew up across ten cities in four different countries, never stayed in any place long enough to become familiar to teachers or classmates or neighbours. Maxwell has mentioned her small town roots a couple times, and though she's never said anything about her schooling Minkowski remembers how the gifted children were treated in her schools and she remembers how the children marked with the condescendingly PC "special needs" codes were treated but she doesn't remember a single school, especially in North America, where she knew of children who were marked as both. She doesn't like what this suggests about Maxwell's childhood. And... well. There's the restraining order. Which she's pretty sure Jacobi doesn't even know the details of.

Isabel knocks on the bathroom door after a few minutes.

"Minkowski? You ok?"

"Fine," Renée says, automatically, but she opens the door. Isabel frowns as soon as she sees her.

"Wow. Yep, you look super fine.”

"Shut up."

"I have a theory as to what this is about, but I'd rather you tell me."

"She was 28," Renée says before she can stop herself.

Isabel exhales. "Yeah. And I was 30 when they sent me up there. And 19, 20, 21-year-olds get sent to fight and die for their countries or their country's bank accounts or politics or religions every day. You can't tell me you haven't worked with people younger than 28 who were in dangerous situations or making life-and-death calls."

"I know that," Renée says sharply. "Jesus, Isabel. I don't know. It just... caught me off guard. I didn't realize she was so young. She's ten years younger than me."

"And you're almost 40. It stops making much of a difference."

"It should," Renée says. "I was ready to kill her. I would have done it." She needs Isabel to understand this for a few different reasons.

"I know."

"And then I go around acting like I have a right to tell her she's safe here. Safe from us. From me."

"None of this is new."

"I don't think it really hit me, before. So many things happened so fast. Plus, things were... different. Up there."

"Mmhm."

"I mean, it isn't like you still want Dmitri dead."

Isabel stares, expressionless. Renée hisses out breath between her teeth. "Isabel."

"We're not talking about me."

"Should we be?"

"Fuck you, Minkowski."

Renée grabs her arm before she can turn away. "Ok, ok. I'll shelve it for now. I know you were just trying to help and I appreciate it. More than you know."

Isabel relaxes under Renée's hand, but she doesn't meet her gaze. "Look, Renée. Maxwell's an adult. She knew what she was getting into. I... have my suspicions about the profiles Kepler targeted when he was creating his team, but that's a different set of issues. It was shitty that you were put in that position, and I think taking time to process that experience is entirely reasonable. But don't make this about your concerns over Maxwell's age or agency or culpability or whatever the hell you're thinking. She and Jacobi both made their choices, and I won't let any of us disrespect them by implying they weren't capable of making those choices because it's insulting and it's dangerous. For us. Remember what they are, Minkowski."

"People," Renée says. "They're people who were likely psychologically and maybe physically manipulated and abused by their commanding officer for *years*. I can't just ignore that, Isabel."

"Ahaha," Isabel says, brushing her hair out of her face. "Definitely physically. Don't ask."

Renée hadn't been planning on it.

"Look, I know they're more than weapons," Isabel says. "I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only one who does. Because the rest of you seem pretty fucking content to slap a label on them and leave them as whichever caricatures best suit your assumptions. You want me to say they're fucked up, Renée? Of course they are. So are all of us. That's what Goddard does. They prey on people fucked up enough that the risks, the moral and ethical issues, the loss of autonomy, it's all worth it. Kepler targeted them because they had abusive childhoods. Because they were isolated from their social networks or never had social networks to begin with. Because they were pariahs in their professional circles. Because they're brilliant. Because they knew how to use every resource at their disposal. Because they don't have leadership qualities on their own. But he also chose them because they were the kind of people who weren't very good at being people. I'm talking about that part of us that tells us what is right or wrong or good or bad, and how theirs were already broken or never worked in the first place by the time Kepler found them."

Isabel's chin has come up as she speaks and she gazes directly at Renée with a familiar hard fire in her eyes. She also drops a hand to her hip at the end of her speech, which is so painfully familiar from those early days on the Hephaestus that Renée has to bite her cheek to keep herself from smiling. God, she really does love this woman. Even when she's infuriating and a little too fond of dramatic oration.

She's thought the word before, but it still takes her breath away every time. There are not a lot of people Renée has taken the time to love in her lifetime.

"Ok," Renée says. Isabel blinks.

"What?"

Renée presses her fingers one at a time against her palm. She is suddenly very tired. "I don't want to fight about this."

She can literally see the way Isabel releases her anger, the way her body falls out of the defensive, aggressive stance. Isabel's told her bits and pieces of her childhood and Renée can't help but imagine Isabel at fifteen or twenty, all neon hair and denim jacket and defiance. It's almost painfully endearing.

"Do you want to watch the rest of the movie?” Isabel asks. "I can always finish it another time. The internet told me how it ended, anyway, because there is nothing good left in this world."

"Oops," Hera says, not sounding at all apologetic.

Part of Renée wants to say yes, wants to climb into the safe, quiet cocoon of her bed with Isabel and let herself fall asleep in the silence. Surprisingly, it's a very small part.

"No," she says. "Let's go back out there. This isn't something I can run away from."

Isabel rests a hand on the small of her back as she steps into the hallway. "I don't think it's something you _need_ to run away from."

When they come back into the living room Dom tilts his chin in silent inquiry. Renée smiles at him, nods. She's ok.

***

"I think I want to get a job," says Hera.

Doug sits up on his bed and pauses Netflix. "Oooookay." He props his pillows up against the wall at the head of his bed and leans back, more-or-less upright. "Far be it for me to stand in the way of your hopes and dreams, but, uh... why?"

"I'm bored," Hera says. And then, like she's just been waiting for the chance, "Do you know how much I was responsible for on the Hephaestus?"

Doug thinks about all the systems that had malfunctioned and all the creative and unexpected ways they'd all almost died. "I can take a guess."

"Whatever your guess is, it's probably too low. I was running millions of processes every second. Monitoring everything inside and outside the station, problem-solving for things that weren't even problems yet. Running probability matrices constantly to ensure the longevity of our resource allocation. Processing readings from the star and cross-referencing with my onboard databases to see if they might mean something, plus developing my own theories. I should definitely have a PHD in astrophysics by now. And now, what do you think I do all day?"

Doug takes a minute to answer, because he's like, 95% sure they’re having a moment, or at least a very important conversation, so he wants to at least try to get things right. "Keep Goddard off our trail?" he offers up, finally. His voice might do that stupid fucking squeak at the end, whatever.

"Yes. And I read, and I learn about things on the internet. There are entire disciplines I have no interest in but I'm becoming an expert in anyway because at least it's one, tiny thing to keep a small, miniscule part of my mind occupied."

"You could help Lovelace and Koudelka with the court case. They're meeting with lawyers next week, I'm sure they'll come back with a whole new set of projects."

Hera is quiet for a few seconds. An eternity. "There's a possibility if I help them with any of it beyond providing my own testimony it could make the evidence inadmissible. Technically I'm not a person. I'm Goddard property. Stolen Goddard property."

"Oh," Doug says, because what the hell else can he say? "Even stuff like surveillance logs, or whatever your equivalent is?"

"I don't have any of those records. I mean, I personally still have all my relevant percept databases and models, but there was no way we had enough room to bring the collected raw data back with us."

“Uhhh huh?" Doug says, blinking slowly. Hera sighs.

"I know what happened, and I have a memory of it in terms of how it affected me, but I couldn't replay a specific memory with any level of accuracy or without bias. Basically, for everything before I woke up here, I remember it sort of the same way a human would. It's super inconvenient."

"Great," Doug huffs. "Thanks. And that bias--"

"Means the best I can give is a personal testimony, the same as the rest of you, and even that might not count for anything. Besides, I'm scared there could be some sort of failsafe built in to me that I don't know about that would make me do... something if I openly and blatantly started sharing Goddard secrets or hacking into their files."

"Something like... Terminator?" Doug drags out the I sound in the 'like' for a good five seconds.

"I was thinking more like destroying the files or contacting Dr. Pryce, but thanks for jumping straight to murder."

Doug almost asks if she's gotten Maxwell to take a look before he realizes what a stupid idea that is. Hera and Maxwell are on remarkably good terms, but there's no way Hera's ever letting Maxwell anywhere near her code. And she has that choice now. Partly thanks to Maxwell. Honestly, Doug really doesn't get their relationship, and he has a sneaking suspicion that neither do they. He does know that they both understand each other on a level that the rest of them just... can't, and that they gravitate towards each other with an inevitability that neither of them seem entirely comfortable with.

Hera had told him, a few months after she'd been brought out of storage, that she had realized after the fact that Maxwell's betrayal had been of a different kind than Hera had first taken it.

"If there was a way she could have done the same thing to a human, she would have," Hera had explained, haltingly. "It wasn't about her respect for my agency as an AI as much as it was about her respect for other people's agency in general. Which is the most hypocritical thing I've ever heard, considering her childhood."

Doug had immediately thought back to his dad, confident and smiling and starting the day with a shot of cheap whisky and said "Sometimes when you grow up only seeing one way to be successful you still default to that yourself, even if it was used to hurt you. You start thinking you can do it better, that you've seen how it gets used to hurt people so now you know what not to do."

So. That had turned into a whole goddamn conversation about Doug's life that he never wants to repeat ever, thank you, but Hera's revelation about Maxwell has stuck with him. On the Hephaestus he'd heard Kepler accuse Maxwell of letting her politics get in the way of her job on more than one occasion, and at the time he'd thought her heartless-- if anything should have been getting in the way of her terrible AI-hurting job it should have been compassion. He's starting to rethink that. Starting to wonder, with every time Hera calls herself 'property' or talks about Pryce, if his own politics might not need to start standing the hell up and getting in some people's way, too.

Now, Doug stares directly into his laptop camera and says "It really sucks that that's something you have to be afraid of." He's learned that sometimes all Hera needs-- all anyone needs -- is for someone to really hear what they're saying. To provide an acknowledgement-- a reminder that they aren't any of them alone in this.

"Yeah," Hera says. "It does."

"So! What kind of job were you thinking? Because I'll give you some life advice right off the bat: if the job ad includes the words "set your own hours” or "be your own boss" it's almost definitely a pyramid scheme."

"I guess I didn't mean a job in the traditional sense," Hera says, sounding a little embarrassed. "I just need something to do. Something more than this. I know everyone's bored-- well, everyone who isn't Mr. Koudelka or Captain Lovelace, but I honestly feel like I'm going to have some kind of breakdown if I don't have something to do."

Doug frowns. "I assume you're being literal about that."

"Well," Hera says. "I mean breakdown in the more psychological sense. Not mechanical. Probably. But there must be... something. Something that needs monitoring or calculating or calibrating. I could probably set up an entire fake research team or startup company if I needed to explain the amount of work that I can do."

"You've been thinking about this for a while."

"You could say that. I just... I hate feeling useless."

Doug drops his head back against the wall and closes his eyes just for a few seconds. "Yeah. Join the club."

***

The back door slams. Dom takes a few quick steps backwards until he's pressed up against the kitchen sink, wooden spoon dripping tomato sauce despondently on the hardwood. Renée growls under her breath and bangs the pot of water in her arms down on the stove hard enough that he's worried she's cracked something in the burner. At the table, Isabel tips her chair back on two legs and pops another grape into her mouth.

"Take off your shoes--" Renée starts, but it's too late. Jacobi is first through the kitchen, trailing muddy footprints. There's a bruise already blossoming across his jaw, and the back of his shirt and jeans are covered in dirt and dead grass. He hurls himself out of the kitchen and Dom can hear his footsteps pounding towards the stairs. Maxwell is about four seconds behind him. There are dead leaves and thistles clumped in her hair, which she's been letting grow out over the winter. Only the knees of her jeans are muddy, but her hands and forearms look like she lost a fight with twenty rose bushes and an angry cat. She uses the back of a chair as a pivot and leaves a hand-shaped smear of blood in her wake.

"Do something," Renée says, glaring at Isabel. Isabel drums her fingers on the table, then reaches over and refills Renée's wine glass.

"There you go."

Dom tries to stifle his laughter and fails. Renée points at him. "Keep. Stirring."

"I'm stirring, I'm stirring." He rinses the spoon and goes back to the stove. "It's been forty-five minutes, I'm sure they'll tire themselves out soon."

Isabel coughs on her own sip of wine. "That's cute," she says.

"I don't even know what they're fighting about," Renée says, sighing, and tearing open the jumbo box of pasta -- there are six of them, he and Doug should probably have gotten the fuck out of aligro after hour three.

"They're not fighting," Isabel says. "Didn't you have dogs growing up?"

"She didn't," Dom says, before Renée can start ranting about the fundamental injustice that was her lack of canine companionship as a child. "And I thought they were cats?"

Isabel waves a hand. "Still applicable. Now that I'm not letting them run themselves into exhaustion they have a lot of excess energy to burn off.". Renée presses her lips together.

"Letting."

Isabel spins the stem of her wineglass between two fingers, kicks a socked foot up onto the chair beside her. It's all very deliberate, very calculated, and Dom is frankly amazed she made it through Basic, let alone all the way to Captain. He can't imagine Isabel Lovelace taking a single order in her entire life. "Yup," she says, popping the p.

"The whole point of getting away from Goddard was so that nobody has control over any of us anymore," Renée says. Isabel lets her chair slam back down to the floor.

Dom stirs the sauce even and steady and watches out of the corner of his eye. He doesn't remember much about his parents beyond blurry childhood snapshots, disjointed and nonsensical, but every once in a while the unspoken tension in a room before an argument breaks out will make his heart pound and his palms go clammy. After the car crash, after he'd moved from Plzen to New York and started learning English from storybooks in his grandmother's lap and newspapers on the porch with his grandfather, he remembers thinking that something in the house felt different, but everything had been different at that point so he can never be sure if this strange, unpredictable anxiety has traceable roots.

"And look how well that was working out for them," Isabel says, still lazily flippant but with an edge to her tone that hadn't been there before. "Letting was a poor choice of words, fine."

"So your solution is to recreate old patterns."

Isabel sets her glass down carefully. "Make up your mind, Renée, before you start accusing me of anything. Six months ago they were common criminals with no redeeming qualities and now they're what? Damaged children in desperate need of your savior complex?"

"Which one of us has a savior complex, exactly?" Renée says, dumping the pasta into the pot. "Let's take a look at the evidence."

Isabel waves a hand around the kitchen. "I think it speaks for itself. None of us asked you to take us in like strays."

"I didn't hear you offering up alternatives."

Isabel snorts. "Because I was just supposed to share my plans with the whole class? With Volodin just waiting to finish what he started five years ago?"

Dom turns down the flame under the sauce and steps back, keeping his back against the counter as he tries to inch as unobtrusively as possible out of the room. This is a familiar argument and it never goes anywhere. He doesn't want to stick around for round 200.

Isabel stands up, shoving her chair back hard. "The reason we got away from Goddard is so that we can burn it to the fucking ground," she says, hard and quiet. "To put a stop to all the shit they're doing, to all the people's lives they're ruining. To get revenge."

"That's what it really boils down to for you, isn't it?" Renée says, sighing. "You promised Goddard you were coming for them years ago after your crew died and you can't let that go."

Isabel smiles one of those sharp smiles that means she's about to rip her own bones out to use as arrows. Dmitri and Doug have that same smile, and it never means anything good. "Come on, Minkowski, we both know that wasn't even me. Not my crew. Hers."

"Bullshit," Renée says, and she steps right into Isabel's space, grabbing her shoulders hard. "That's bullshit and you know it."

Isabel moves like she's about to send Renée flying across the kitchen, but then stills with a visible effort. "Do I? What am I supposed to do, exactly? Where do you see this going for me? I call up my parents after seven years of them thinking their daughter's dead and 'Hey, I know it's been a while but here's a shitty copy if you're ever feeling nostalgic'."

"You’re not," Renée says. "I never knew her. You. Before. I didn't start to care about an idea, I care about a person. You."

"That's cute, Minkowski. It also doesn't answer my question."

"Was there a question in there?” Renée asks, a little meanly. She drops her hands from Isabel's shoulders and rubs at her eyes like she's been awake for days. "If we all just started wallowing in our own self-pity we'd never go anywhere."

"So instead we just ignore the years of our life that Goddard stole? The fucking nightmare we had to live through?"

"You seem to be doing pretty well at it," Renée retorts. "When was the last time you talked about any of this that wasn't in the context of the court case? Not counting now."

"There is no 'out of the context of the court case', that's the whole point."

Dom doesn't agree with that last, but he does see where Isabel's coming from. To say she's been repressing or ignoring what happened to her, to all of the crew, is so inaccurate as to be laughable. He's sat beside her as she outlined every tiny detail of her years in space in hopes that there might be at least some small parts that could be used against Goddard. There isn't much. The jurisdictional issue is less of an issue and more of an insurmountable cliff face with barbed wire at the top.

"Isabel," Renée says, dropping her hands to her sides. "Have you even taken the time to mourn for your crew?"

"Her crew,” Isabel says, which is as good as an answer.

"Your crew," Renée says, again. Dom almost says something, but he reminds himself that Renée knows Isabel better than he does. She's got to know if Isabel considers herself the same person who went to space in the first place or if there's enough of a separation there that she's starting to create her own autonomous sense of identity. It isn't exactly something she talks about. Ever.

"There's going to be a life after Goddard," Renée says, quietly. "You have to start thinking beyond the take down. You have to consider the possibility that we won't win."

Isabel smiles, which is deeply disconcerting. "I have. I've considered that possibility quite a lot, don't worry."

"Isabel," Renée says. "Tell me that's not why. They aren't weapons."

And back around the conversation goes, Dom thinks, disappointed. After seeing the toll not taking time to process had taken on Renée, he's really been hoping Isabel will take a few minutes or hours or weeks to stop and take a metaphorical breath. He isn't sure if anyone else really realizes just how singular her focus on destroying Goddard is.

"It's not the only reason," Isabel says, sitting back down on the far side of the table, putting it between herself and the two of them. "It's not even the primary reason. You want the truth? Of course it's part of it. They damn well are weapons, and I will use whatever resources are at my disposal. But more than that-- Christ, Renée. I'm still pretty new at this whole 'not being a real person' gig. It's kind of nice to spend time with experts."

"Isabel," Dom says, because he cannot fucking help himself and Renée looks like she's just been hit by a truck. "Being human has nothing to do with being a person. Ask Hera."

Isabel smiles a bit at him, a real smile. "I never said it did."

**Author's Note:**

> If there are things you'd like me to explore in this series please let me know here or on [Tumblr](http://thought-42.tumblr.com) and I'll see what I can do


End file.
